DIS is a multimedia art magazine. DIS is a dissection of fashion and commerce which seeks to dissolve conventions, distort realities, disturb ideologies, dismember the establishment, and disrupt the dismal dissemination of fashion discourse that's been distinctly distributed in order to display the disenfranchised as disposable. All is open to discussion. There is no final word. DIS is Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, Nick Scholl, and David Toro.

This group show, curated by Artists Space’s director and curator, Stefan Kalmár, and its curator, Richard Birkett, takes as its jumping-off point the Pictures show that Douglas Crimp organized at Artists Space in 1977. Crimp introduced the work of a generation of artists, and their use of “quotation”, “excerptation”, “framing”, and “staging”, that has since become synonymous with the postmodern relationship to pictures.

Frozen Lakes examines the prominence that these artistic strategies have for a generation of artists born after Pictures. It equally attests to the changing nature of critical inquiry within today’s economy of image production, and the shifting relationship between information and meaning.

The temporalities that Crimp identified in Pictures – “the staged tableau”, “the freeze frame”, “the historical fragment”, and “the fascinated, yet perplexed gaze” – sought to highlight the picture as a “signifying structure of its own accord”, usurping the reality that it claims to interpret. The contemporary experience of images is saturated with a heightened notion of temporality: signifying structures circulating and performing through networks of value, desire and exchange. The sense that pictures occupy very distinct places in culture, and reveal a vertical “strata of representation”, has been replaced by fluid, maybe even liquid, modes of accumulation and aggregation.

From mode of production to conditions of circulation, ‘Frozen Lakes’ investigates how [young] artists are approaching images today.

L’Eau des Algues Two alchemists already aware of each other’s Instagrams meet for the first time in a gay sauna. They are swimming; it’s the Hood By Air afterparty in Paris. They are Lukas Hofmann and Nils Amadeus Lange. Months later, they meet again. They are on the edge of yet another steaming pool; it’s the Manifesta Biennale closing event at Cabaret Voltaire. They are performing the perfume titled “L’eau des Algues.” Head notes: Zürich… [read more »]

While reading A Very Short Introduction to Game Theory, I came across the following passage, “If you want people to vote, we need to move to a more decentralized system in which every vote really does count enough to outweigh the lack of enthusiasm for voting which so many people obviously feel…Simply repeating the slogan that ‘every vote counts’ isn’t ever going to work, because it isn’t true.” I was jarred. For me, anecdotally knowing… [read more »]

When life is being super unfair, just do what we all do: suffer the consequences. I wake up and the first thing I do is check my phone. A convenient euphemism for using Facebook’s machine learning techniques to discover which 300 entries are statistically most likely to stand out from the tens of thousands of brain dumps my friends and family have produced over the last 48 hours. Impressed by what Facebook provides, I think… [read more »]

In order to make sense of state politics in the birthplace of statistical marketing and the internet, one has to be wary of the effects of these technologies on the country’s popular media. In a time when our news and advertisements are tailored to our pre-recorded political opinions, it can be especially difficult to empathize with differing political views. Likewise, learning about the histories of state politics is not encouraged by platforms that profit from… [read more »]

We can get together and laugh about it. We can heave sighs and express disbelief, but it’s never enough. This presidential election year has lasted for years, and they sit on citizens like a slick film. We feel touched by an unshakable germ, invaded by a blood-sucker, afflicted by a social cancer, drained of the plump vitality of life and the amazing liberty of choices, and transformed into a cynical, depressed shrivel. After being touched… [read more »]

What is a piece of clothing that “works”? Who is working whom? Is the one who poses the one who actually “works” hardest? The S/S 2017 collection of Berlin-based, Swedish- Vietnamese designer NHU DUONG entitled ‘WORK COLLECTION’ plays with the ideas of professionalism, leisure and appropriateness through a range of garments that are inspired by work outfits and hobby uniforms. Overalls, raw denim outfits, kung-fu pyjamas, biker pants, baggy tights and gloves, bomber-jackets, bomber suits,… [read more »]

Preparing to Welcome the Chthulucene is a text made up of living exercises to accompany Haraway’s theorization of the Chthulucene and her upcoming book Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Haraway posits that not only should we name the Anthropocene carefully (including the terms Capitalocene and Plantationocene within its narrative) but that we should also be using this crucial ecological timeframe to move towards a dynamically multi-species, “sym-chtonic“, sym-poietic future: the Chthulucene.… [read more »]